Home company to popular Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) non-fungible tokens (NFTs), Yuga Labs is reportedly in talks with tech investors to sell $5 billion of its company stake in a new funding round.
Sources for the Financial Times disclosed that the NFT start-up is currently negotiating with one of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firms, Andreessen Horowitz (A16z), which seeks to expand its investments into crypto projects and become a major cryptocurrency investment company.
The A16z firm is known to invest in both early-stage start-ups and established growth companies. Its investments span the mobile, cryptocurrency, gaming, social, e-commerce, education and enterprise IT (including cloud computing, security, and software as a service) industries. The company was previously an early investor in Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb and Skype. It presently owns 41 crypto firms in its portfolio, including Autograph, Cryptokitties and OpenSea.
The investments with BAYC, valued at $5 billion would potentially become the first institutional investment in Yuga Labs company, run by pseudonymous founders — Gordon Goner, Emperor Tomato Ketchup, No Sass and Gargamel.
The terms of the share transactions, according to the sources close to Yuga Labs, have not been finalised. The Bored Ape NFT creators and A16z are yet to put out official comments on the transaction.
Yuga’s creations, under BAYC, are the second most traded NFTs on OpenSea, (OpenSea is a peer-to-peer marketplace where NFTs, rare digital items and crypto-collectibles are purchased).
Since it launched in 2021, the price of the Bored Ape NFT has soared upwards, raising the value of each piece of the digital token to $250,000. Yuga in April last year, had “minted” 10,000 of the collectibles for about $300 a piece.
The digital tokens are used by owners to signal stature on social networks,s as Twitter where they exist as hexagonal profile pictures, rather than the normal circular pictures. When bought, Bored Ape holders also retain full commercial usage rights of the unique art on the blockchain.
This means that while Yuga created the NFT collection, the company no longer controls the intellectual property for the individual works of art. Bored Apes also grant owners access to exclusive events and sought-after merchandise. However, the parent company receives a cut from resales of the digital art.
Among popular holders of the digital token which launched in February last year are top music acts, Justin Bieber, Snoop Dogg and Eminem. Other top Hollywood celebrities like wrestler and actor, John Cena, Twitter founder, Jack Dorsey, socialite, Paris Hilton and actress, Lindsay Lohan all own unique pieces of the Bored Ape NFT.